And the Land Lay Still (93 page)

‘Sadly, Angus isn’t here to object to how I’ve arranged his work. Fifty years of Scottish life, 1947–1997. History is written by the survivors, but what is that history? That’s the point I was trying to make just now. We don’t know what the story is when we’re in it, and even after we tell it we’re not sure. Because the story doesn’t end. As William Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” ’

Got it in! Fine. He catches Walter’s eye, is he looking bored or contemplative? Walter, who’s always seemed about sixty to Mike since they first met thirty-five years ago, but must in reality only be in his seventies now, is as grudgingly generous as ever. In a minute Mike will invite him to sing. ‘Something appropriate for those fifty years,’ he said, when he spoke to him about it on the phone a few weeks ago. ‘I leave the choice to you.’ And Walter said, ‘Only fifty years? You’re narrowing my options there.’ Mike posted him an early copy of the exhibition book so he could get a feel for the range of images, knowing that he would weigh against them what he might or might not sing, and he does not doubt that Walter will come up with the goods.

‘I’m going to shut up now …’ A ragged cheer from Eric, Jeremy and some others. The Polish and Romanian girls and boys in their black aprons are lining up on the outskirts with replenished trays of wine and fizzy water. What happens when you leave a country, when you arrive elsewhere? Do you take your own story with you? Or are you like a new character entering an old story? Those intersecting, overlapping map lines again. You see the ones you want to see.

‘I’m going to shut up now, and Walter Fleming’s going to step up and sing for us. But before he does …’ He pauses again. What is it, this precious, ponderous thing that he holds, that he wants to give to these people, that he wants them to take away, back on to the streets, into the bars and restaurants, into their cars and the last trains to Glasgow and Stirling and Dundee, back to their homes and their own private and personal griefs and joys, their family gatherings and their couplings and their solitudes? What is it he has for
them? ‘Before he does, I want to pass something on, something that was said to me recently by an old and dear friend who can’t be here tonight. You have to go away and think about this. It seems very simple but I think it’s profound. Trust the story. That’s all. Trust the story. Whatever it is these pictures tell you, individually or collectively, trust the story. We’re only human after all. Whatever else we put faith in will, in the end, betray us or we will betray it. But the story never betrays. It twists and turns and sometimes it takes you to terrible places and sometimes it gets lost or appears to abandon you, but if you look hard enough it is still there. It goes on. The story is the only thing we can really, truly know.’

A suitable silence. He steps back from the microphone. The clapping starts. He used the word ‘profound’ and immediately he’s beset with self-doubt, wondering if they’ll think him the very opposite of profound. Maybe they’ll go away empty-handed.
What the hell was that about?
But the applause goes on and he feels its warmth again, as if – even if they don’t understand what he’s said, even if they don’t believe it – they accept his offer, accept that he wants to give them something. And this is doubly strange because he feels remote from their warmth; he’s come down from the north and he’ll retreat there again in a day or two, and does he really have a connection with them, here in bustling, packed Edinburgh at the start of August? If he does, why does he feel such an overwhelming need to withdraw, to get away from them again?

He has a sudden yearning for Murdo. He wishes he had come. Yet is glad he chose not to.

He moves into the crowd as Walter, passing him with a smile, goes to the microphone.

§

Trust the story
. Ellen thinks she knows what Mike means. She’s also identified the absent source, though: Jean Barbour. What if you don’t trust the storyteller, Mike? But as soon as the question forms she sees how he would answer it: the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can’t; the story can only ever be itself.

Aye, weel, mibbe
. It’s her own comment but the voice in her head is her mother’s. Eighty-three when Mary’s number was finally called last year. She didn’t come out to the fish van and the fish man knew
there was something wrong, keeked through the window and saw her lying on the sitting-room floor. He forced a window to get in and she was still alive but cold as one of his fish; she’d been there all night and it was February. The television blethering away in the corner. He phoned for an ambulance and sat with her till it came but she couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. While he waited he became aware of a burning smell and went through to the kitchen just in time to lift a pan of what had been tomato soup off the ring as it caught fire. ‘Burned my bloody fingers daein it,’ he told Ellen later, ‘but at least the hoose didna go up. She was a good customer tae me, your mither, and she never owed me a penny.’ She can hear the fish man, she can hear Mary.
Aye, weel, mibbe
. By the time Ellen got to the hospital Mary was hooked up to everything. ‘Dinna let them resuscitate me,’ had been her plea to Ellen and the boys. ‘See if I ever keel ower and if I come back I’ll be a vegetable, dinna let them resuscitate me.’ And there she was, hooked up, but she was never coming back. She didn’t speak another word before she went. Ellen sat beside her, trying to mind the last time they’d spoken on the phone, what they’d said. Her mother’s last words to her. And she couldn’t remember even though it had been only a couple of days before. So does that mean they said nothing of any consequence? Surely the thing of consequence was that they’d been speaking. The importance of banalities. ‘My mother made it clear,’ she told the doctor, ‘that in these circumstances she just wants to go. So if there are machines here that are just keeping her going, without which she’d be away, switch them off, please.’ The doctor nodded. It wasn’t quite that simple. But he got the message. Three hours later Mary was, as she’d wished, away.

Mike has said something else that she wants both to think about and to let pass. It’s the kind of thing that worries her in the middle of the night while Robin sleeps untroubled beside her:
does anybody else, coming along a little later, really care?
What gnaws at Ellen is the shrug or vacant look Kirsty sometimes gives her when she’s sounding off about this or that political issue; the look that says, why do you get so worked up about this stuff? As if it has nothing to do with her at all. No, scrub the ‘as if’. Politics and Kirsty are total strangers. In Ellen’s mind it’s a kind of moral failing that her daughter doesn’t vote. But whose?

Kirsty, next to her, is slim and lovely and seems free of care. She’s wearing a green linen dress Ellen doesn’t dare imagine the price of. That’s another generational thing: society hasn’t managed to eradicate poverty but it’s done a good job on wiping out thrift.

Stop it stop it stop it, she tells herself. She’s your child. Is it her fault that she’s grown up not to be you? Don’t resent that, be grateful for it.

It’s not just Kirsty though, it’s the world she inhabits. She works for an independent film and TV production company based in a renovated warehouse in Leith. Ellen can never remember her job title but she seems to do a bit of everything across marketing, acquisitions, rights and human resources. It makes Ellen think of Jock, her father, and how, bizarrely, he might have been ahead of his time the way he dodged and danced through his working life, the difference being he did it as a manual labourer. He had plenty of bullshit but no qualifications in it. Kirsty on the other hand has a degree in Language and Communications Studies and an MSc in Media Management. She works long hours, in fact she never seems to stop and yet Ellen can’t help feeling that there’s something phoney about what she does. Even phonier than what
she
does. With each generation there is less contact – real, physical touch – with the tools, the materials, even the products of its labour. Jock Imlach started as a miner and, even when he moved on to the hydro schemes, concrete and rock and water were what he had to work with or dodge working with, and dust was what killed him. Ellen’s world has gone from roaring, oily printing presses, clattering typewriters and tramping the streets to digital typesetting, research on the internet and articles emailed in from home half an hour before the deadline. It’s decades since she physically put a story on an editor’s desk. Kirsty’s world is a step further along the road, so virtual it’s almost invisible. Meetings about meetings about meetings. Pitches, development, pre-production commissions. Apparently you can turn a profit from
not
making programmes. It’s the unreality of reality TV, all that crap. Where’s the substance? Ellen feels she’s losing touch.

§

On a bench under one of the screened-off high windows, some distance from the back of the standing crowd, an elderly couple sit
hand in hand while the speechifying goes on. Don Lennie and Marjory Taylor, as was. Later she became Marjory Forrester, and still is, but Don always thinks of her as Marjory Taylor, the English nurse. Don has bought two copies of the Angus Pendreich book, one for them and one for Saleem. Marjory says he should have waited, maybe they’ll give him a freebie when they realise who he is, but that’s not the way Don operates. Apart from anything else, he feels an obligation to buy, since they’re here on false pretences. Billy’s Catriona had rushed in excitedly one evening a few weeks back, waving a big postcard under his eyes. ‘Look!’ she said, and he looked, and there they were, Saleem and him, standing outside Saleem’s shop. ‘It’s an invitation to the opening of an exhibition,’ Catriona explained. ‘It’s come to me because I know the son of the photographer whose work it is. That’s the only reason I can think of. Billy and I can’t go because we’re away on holiday, but you can. You must. You’re in it.’ He studied the card. ‘So it would seem,’ he said. ‘I mind that time. The fellow just appeared one day when we were ootside talking and asked if he could take oor picture and we said aye and then he wrote doon oor names and drove away, and then it was in one of the Sunday papers, but tae be honest I’d completely forgotten aboot it.’ ‘Will you go?’ Catriona said. ‘I’ll email Michael, that’s the son, and tell him you’ll go.’ Don hummed and hawed but Marjory sided with Catriona. ‘You must,’ she said. So he agreed. And here they are.

The next day he saw Saleem and tried to persuade him to join them but he wouldn’t. Saleem was delighted with the photograph though. ‘We look pretty good, don’t we?’ he said. ‘At least you do. But why aren’t we smiling?’ ‘It was how ye posed for photies in thae days,’ Don said. ‘I probably tellt ye tae wipe the grin aff your face. Weel, if ye’ll no come wi us, I’ll bring ye a book back.’

So now he has the two books. He paid in cash, two twenties and a tenner, a rush of extravagance in his eighty-ninth year, and the lassie at the till seemed a wee bit perplexed, as if she didn’t often see the real stuff any more, but she took it anyway. Pretty soon, perhaps, shops will start surcharging folk who pay in cash, to cover the cost of taking it to the bank. The way you’re already penalised if you don’t pay your gas bill by direct debit, or the way they give you a discount if you’re rich enough to pay your house insurance in a
oner. The world we fought for, Don thinks bitterly, and then, as he always does now, he shrugs it off. Not his problem. Anyway, Catriona’s pal, the photographer’s son, Michael Pendreich, is going on about this and that and in spite of the PA system Don can’t hear very well so he thinks this may be a good time to go and find a lavatory, because his bladder is a bit suspect these days and needs emptying on a regular basis. So he hands the books in their thick but transparent plastic bag to Marjory and heads off, leaving the voice and the low undercurrent of crowd noise behind him.

§

Earlier, Ellen and Kirsty met for a drink in a bar at the top of Leith Walk. Everywhere was filling up – locals on their way home or warming up at the start of a long night, tourists and theatregoers, the city’s usual August mix. Ellen grabbed seats while Kirsty shimmied her way to the bar, returning promptly with two enormous glasses of white wine.

‘How’s Robin?’ she asked.

‘Same as ever,’ Ellen said. ‘He sends you his love.’

‘No chance of persuading him in from the Far East, I suppose?’

‘For tonight? You know Robin. Not his scene. He might come in early one weekday morning, see the exhibition when it’s empty. Or he might not. He’s already been through the book.’

‘Which you’ve written the intro for?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘As a favour to Mike?’

‘Partly.’

‘Is he going to pay you for it?’

‘He says so. Not a lot, but I’d have done it anyway.’

Kirsty raised an eyebrow.

‘What? Is that so awful, doing something for a friend for nothing?’

‘No, but you’re always telling me there’s a going rate for every job, and if women don’t hold out for it …’

‘I know, I know. There are always exceptions. Anyway, I like the photographs. I had things I wanted to say about them. And Mike was in a fix. He’d tried writing it himself but got stuck.’

‘Probably he was too close to it,’ Kirsty said. ‘His dad and everything.’

‘Aye, I think that was it.’ Ellen touched her daughter’s wrist. ‘Listen, I hope you’ve not had to put anything off for this.’ It was Friday night after all. As far as she knew there wasn’t a man in Kirsty’s life right now, but she didn’t tell her everything.

‘No, I wanted to come. I want to see the new gallery. And it’ll be nice to see Mike again. I can’t remember when I last did. Definitely not since he and Uncle Adam split up.’

‘Well that was a while ago. You were still a student. Your other uncle says he’s hoping to come along, by the way.’

‘Gavin? Good. Haven’t seen him for ages either. But not Adam?’

‘I don’t think so. He’s too settled in Barcelona.’

There was a brief silence. Maybe they were both a little pissed off with Adam, or a little jealous of him. Then Kirsty said, ‘I thought I might come out this weekend. Otherwise I’ll never see Robin. Would that be okay?’